Appeal to Authority

I often encounter the appeal to authority fallacy in conversation. This fallacy describes any arguement in the form "X is true because Y says so".

This fallacy can take many forms. The easiest to dismiss are ones like "Hillary Clinton is a shapeshifting lizard because David Icke says so." Although arguements in the form, "The sky is blue because David Icke says so" can sometimes make the best logicians momentarily stumble.

Then there's the form "Gravitational waves are real because a bunch of very smart scientists all validated it and their data and methods are open for review"

Clearly, there are times when appeal to authority is an appropriate rhetorical technique. Quoting an expert speaking about their field of expertise is absolutely fine. It may not be the most convincing arguement possible, since it lacks a direct explanation, but in a world as complex as ours, one has to account for the investment of time required to grok the details of a complex problem.

As we discussed in the mini-episode on value of information, one has to balance the costs of aquiring new information against the benefits of acting with that information verse acting without the information.

So how is authority established? Peer reviewed journals are an important part of the conversation. They aren't perfect. We've seen a few scandals involving journals accepting random articles of jargon generated algorithmically. There also exists a sort of cargo cult of journals presenting knowledge but pretending to be reputable sources of knowledge. Simply saying "peer reviewed journal" is no longer enough. One now needs to validate the journal before trusting it's contents.

This creates an interesting situation I feel might best be described as "bayesian deferred skepticism". It's the idea that I don't have enough computational resources to validate individual datums, but a have found a particular source to be reliable in the past, so I accept the assertions of the journal in question based on my posterior beliefs of it's accuracy conditioned on the topic.

With this in mind, I'm surprised at how frequently I assign high likelihood of correctness to papers found on arXiv.org. This is a pre-publication (i.e. not peer reviewed) repository. In theory, anyone could publish anything there. Yet somehow, this site has so far remained fairly immune to outright crankism. Perhaps its because producers of pseudoscience know it's audience to be small and confined to well informed, rational people. Yet against all odds, I find myself trusting the conclusions of studies too long for me to delve into simply because they've taken the time to produce and upload a publication to the arXiv. I hope my posteriors will update if the tide should ever turn.

While we may not live in a meritocracy, the peer review process does, in general, facilitate highly refined content on particular subject matters. Yet there will always be journals of higher and lower quality. Despite this seeming weakness, I still see this as a strength in the peer review process. If I can validate that the output of a particular journal is of high quality, then I can trust their future articles without the extensive validation that biological constraints might prevent me from doing.

While I will always remain skeptical of appeal to authority claims, I find myself making context aware concessions regularly.